Beck's fur is comfortable? Wait another two months and try again when it sheds? Wood secretly complained in his heart. But outwardly, he was very gentle: "Alright, are you hungry now? I'll go get you something to eat."

"I want to eat cake, and I want strawberry milk."

"No, if you keep this up, all your teeth will fall out."

"But I really want to eat…"

"Jessica Johnson, no acting cute!"

"Bad Wood!"

"…Jessica, listen to me… Hey! No biting!"

Chapter 2: Going to Act in a Movie?

Wood successfully got the $100 gambling money he wanted. The very next afternoon, Helen King and Grace Parker took Wood and Jessica to the hospital to visit the new baby.

To Wood, the newborn was alright; compared to when Jessica was just born, the only difference was the downward-slanting eyebrows. Of course, those eyebrows were naturally inherited from her father. But to Jessica, this much-anticipated little sister wasn't as wonderful as she had imagined: wrinkled skin, cried at the slightest touch, needed diaper changes all the time, and worst of all, her sister's eyebrows weren't as pretty as hers or their mom's, but looked more like their dad's. What annoyed her most was that when she told Wood this, he just burst out laughing.

Wood didn't hesitate to tease her: "Mao Mao, you were even uglier than her when you were born." After teasing Jessica, Wood turned to the Aunt Johnson lying on the bed and asked, "Auntie, have you and Uncle decided on her name?"

"Of course we have, her formal name is Krystal Johnson. That was decided a long time ago. As for her English name, it's just the translation of 'crystal'—Krystal, Crystal." The child's father, Uncle Johnson, immediately chimed in.

"I see, so her nickname is Molly Jr., right?" Wood put on a look of sudden realization, but secretly thought, as expected.

That's how kids are—just seconds ago, Molly was upset that her sister's eyebrows didn't look like hers, but now she was happy because of her sister's nickname, Molly Jr..

Molly Jr. Little Crystal was better behaved, smarter, and cuter than Big Molly Jessica—this was the conclusion Wood came to at age eleven, specifically on June 2, 1999, the second day of summer vacation at a California public elementary school. At the time, he was carrying Little Crystal and trudging behind the two sets of parents along a beach in California. The reason for his difficult progress was that Jessica, who was almost as tall as him, was pulling on him from behind, constantly demanding that Wood apologize to her.

A few minutes earlier, the two sisters had asked to take a photo together on the beach. But just as Wood pressed the shutter, he was speechless to find that ten-year-old Jessica was riding on the back of five-year-old Little Crystal, and Little Crystal had no idea how to deal with her sister's bullying—she was almost in tears from being squashed, but kept her legs straight and said nothing. Annoyed, Wood immediately dropped the camera, ran over, pulled Jessica off, and then bent down to fix Little Crystal's hair—her two little braids had been flattened by her sister.

Jessica had always been like this. When Crystal was a baby, he even once saw Jessica put Little Crystal outside the stroller and sit inside herself. But this time, Wood was really angry. While fixing Little Crystal's hair in his arms, he scolded Jessica standing beside him. The four adults nearby didn't care about any of this, as if the bullying and being bullied, the scolding and being scolded, had nothing to do with them—they were clearly used to it.

Finally, after carrying Little Crystal and dragging Jessica, who was almost as tall as him, for over a hundred meters, Wood arrived at the seaside restaurant. His own parents seemed to have arranged a dinner here with some friends from Korea.

After putting Little Crystal down and pulling over the still-pouting Jessica, Wood respectfully bowed to the group of people in front of him, all about the same age as his parents. After all, you can never be too polite, and Korean etiquette is almost strict to the extreme. Sure enough, it worked—he immediately received praise from the adults:

"This must be Helen and Grace's child, so well-mannered."

"Didn't expect a child living abroad to understand etiquette so well."

"Really impressive. And the two little girls are very pretty too."

They were a group of visitors from back home, about seven or eight people, most of them alumni from Sogang University, and both of Wood's parents were graduates of the Sogang University School of Business. They were college classmates, studied abroad together, then fell in love, got married, and had children.

The Johnson couple beside them were just there to accompany.

The adults' conversation was incomprehensible and boring to Jessica and Little Crystal. But Wood listened with great interest.

While holding Little Crystal by his side and feeding her, he listened to the adults discuss politics, management, art, and the scenery in Korea. Gradually, the conversation focused on two things: one was that their alumna, former president Park Chung-hee's eldest daughter Park Geun-hye, after nearly 20 years of silence, had successfully been elected last year in her father's birthplace, Daegu, North Gyeongsang Province, becoming a member of the National Assembly, and seemed to be rising in power within the Grand National Party.